William A. Wulf, a pioneering computer science researcher, entrepreneur, and policymaker who helped adapt one of the Pentagon’s early communications networks into the network that eventually became the Internet, died March 10 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was 83 years old.
The University of Virginia confirmed his death, at a hospice, but did not give a cause.
Dr. Wulf made a career in computer science when the field barely existed. As the importance of computers grew, his career became a road map of the developing field: first in academic research, then as an entrepreneur, then as a policymaker. He later led efforts to reshape and inspire thinking about engineering conduct, progress, and ethics.
William Allan Wulf was born in Chicago on December 8, 1939, the only son of an engineer who was disabled at an early age by Parkinson’s disease. He earned a BS in physics and an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
As a graduate student at the University of Virginia in 1968, Dr. Wulf was one of the first people to receive a Ph.D. in computer science, a new academic offshoot of applied mathematics, electrical engineering, and related disciplines.
After completing his Ph.D., he joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a center for computer science research. There, he worked on computer architecture and programming languages, in particular compilers, which translate programs written in so-called “high-level” languages, such as today’s Java or C++, into steps that a computer can execute.
He and his wife, Anita K. Jones, also a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, left the university in 1981 to found Tartan Laboratories, which specialized in compilers (and was named after the university’s sports teams).
When Dr. Wulf and Dr. Jones left the company in 1988, it was cited as one of the high-tech companies transforming Pittsburgh from a city of rusting steel into a high-tech powerhouse. It was later sold to Texas Instruments.
Dr. Wulf and Dr. Jones moved on to teaching positions at the University of Virginia, but Dr. Wulf took time off to join the National Science Foundation’s Directorate of Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering. There, he worked with Al Gore, then a senator, in drafting legislation to make the military computer network, Arpanet, available to civilian researchers through the foundation’s NSFnet. That model eventually gave way to widely accessible, commercially operated networks.
According to the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional group, Dr. Wulf was “among a very small and distinguished group of people who made important and central contributions to the creation of the modern Internet.”
In 1990, he returned to the University of Virginia, whose computer science program had become a separate department in 1984 and was chaired by Dr. Jones. She is survived by her, along with her two daughters, Ellen Wulf Epstein and Karin Wulf, and four grandchildren.
Over the years, he has been honored by every major professional society in computing, as well as the American Philosophical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and other groups.
In 1993, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1996 was named its interim president, in part, the academy said in a statement on his death, to “restore its focus” and repair its frayed relationships with the Academies. of Medicine and Sciences. The following year he was elected to complete that presidential term, and in 2001 he was elected to a full six-year term.
Today many engineers, and even many computer scientists, know him less for his technical achievements than for his work in academia, where, among other things, he theorized about the factors needed to foster engineering innovation (tax credits are ineffective , he claimed). , and monopolies are not necessarily a bad thing); he ardently advocated for greater diversity in the field (because it pays economic dividends); and, in one of his last official acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics and Society, which has produced reports offering guidance in dealing with complex technologies, including in genetic research and the teaching of evolution.
“The complexity of newly designed systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raises a number of ethical issues that engineers hadn’t been thinking about,” he said in a 2008 interview describing the center. .
“I don’t mean to diminish their technical contributions,” Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, said in an interview. Both Dr. Wulf and Dr. Jones “are giants in the field,” he said, but Dr. Wulf will be best remembered for his inspiring leadership in engineering.
In particular, he said, Dr. Wulf was “a strong advocate for broadening participation in the field” not only by women and members of other underrepresented groups, but also by people who did not necessarily come from “big research universities, mainly on the coasts. .”
Dr. Wulf called engineering “problem solving under constraints”: time, money, or other practical problems. Bringing diverse experiences and viewpoints to problems, he said, increases the chances of success. Without differing points of view, he told an academy meeting in 1998, “we pay an opportunity cost. A cost in products not built, in designs not considered, in constraints not understood, in processes not invented.
Or, as Dr. Lazowska put it: “You don’t need to have a social conscience. All you have to be is a capitalist who wants to do better things and sell more.”
After leaving his position at the academy, Dr. Wulf returned to the University of Virginia. But he resigned in protest in 2012 after the university’s Board of Visitors, in a dispute in part over what some members saw as spending too much on the humanities and not enough on online learning, forced the resignation of its president, Teresa. Sullivan. She was rehired two weeks later after widespread protests.
Despite pleas, including from students protesting with banners praising “Our Hero Wulf,” Dr. Wulf refused to return, saying he could not accept the board’s “command and control” approach, which he described as “the worst example of corporate governance I’ve ever had”. seen.”
When talking about the joys of engineering, he often referred to a situation he encountered as a student at the University of Illinois, working a summer job for a company that made automatic telephone dialers.
The company was making a machine that read phone numbers from holes punched in plastic cards. Periodically, the cards would jam and the machine would crash.
But when he looked at the device, he recalled in an interview years later, he had “a Eureka moment.” She was able to see what the problem was and how to fix it, and when she made a cardboard mockup of his design, it worked.
His idea earned him a bonus, he said, but his real reward was “the creative thrill” of engineering: designing something that solves a human problem.
“It’s addictive,” he said.